


The Ice Fair

by Altonym



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-12
Updated: 2013-07-12
Packaged: 2017-12-19 05:19:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/879892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Altonym/pseuds/Altonym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dylan and Jacob meet amidst busy schedules for one of the burgeoning traditions of a rejuvenated Earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ice Fair

**Author's Note:**

> This is maybe the fluffiest of a fair few fluffy Dylan/Jacob fics I've posted, but eh. I really value their relationship as it gets older and they know each other better and better. I warn you, nothing happens in this fic.

It was the winter of 2193, seven years after the end of the Reaper War, when the people of Earth finally began to notice. Those sitting in the new courtyard gardens - constructed as part of the Alliance’s community building philosophy - found themselves suddenly snowed in. Solid ice began to claw at the hem of the Alliance Command HQ in central London. Farther afield, the Addis Ababa Alliance HQ reported that areas of the Ethiopian highlands robbed of their fertility by the rapid global warming of the last hundred years had suddenly begun to see rain, the restoration of the soil that had once provided coffee across the entire planet.  
  
The Oslo Branch dropped out of contact for two days when their comms array was taken out by blizzard, the Eldfell-Ashland thermal energy plant in Iceland reported 100 year lows, Russian boreholes stopped production to evacuate their workers - meanwhile, meteorologists throughout the fragile new government gave a collective shrug, occasionally punctuated by a panicked expression.  
  
It would take a few weeks for the Alliance brains to jump to the explanation - it was the converters. Over eight hundred sizeable greenhouse gas converters, launched into a high altitude in the early 2010s to slow the rapid change in climate that had already robbed Earth of several previously habitable zones. They were solar powered, independently guided, and checked only once every six months - they were reliable. Even the Council species were impressed upon first contact; humanity’s desperate lunge for a healthier planet was incorporated into colony terraforming efforts across turian space as part of the Armistice deal.  
  
When the Reapers invaded, they destroyed huge swathes of Earth’s industrial infrastructure - factories, workshops, processing units, power plants. The consequences had been almost immeasurable; a massive blow to the human economy as a whole, industrial runoff in major oceans, huge zones of radiation that still remained dangerous without proper shielding or equipment. Amongst all of the immediate hassle, nobody had thought about the bloody carbon footprint.  
  
On the surface of the planet, vegetation had begun to reclaim those cities abandoned for lost, producing millions of acres of new life, new lungs. And in the sky, a handful of converters kept running - powering themselves by the sun and by the trapped methane they collected, using high-efficiency photosynthesising cells to produce oxygen from carbon dioxide - metal Amazons, breathing life back into Earth. It was decided, once the Alliance community had worked out what was going on, that the situation would be monitored and the converters located. They would reconfigure the converters and assign scientists to track the progress of Earth’s climate. The aim would be to return Earth to a cooler state, one that could withstand the rebuild effort and the inevitable waste of the booming postwar population.  
  
It had given the planet back its snow. A human Extranet meme sprang up depicting snowmen, snowsari, elaborate and complex sculptures made by those with a little more time and a newfound enthusiasm for snow. Even the Alliance personnel joined in - a giant version of Admiral-in-chief Hackett’s head made the rounds, photographed next to the smirking man himself. Two cheeky engineers from the Shackleton Meteorological Institute in Antarctica posted their own “snow-reaper” carved via a faulty, low-powered mining laser into the face of a large ridge formation. In the foreground you can see Drs Maria Paphides and Jennifer Trent brandishing the gun between them, massive grins on their faces. Three hundred million hits. Something of a snow fever overtook the Earth settlements in the north, and while the reconstruction architects bustled to incorporate snow resistance into their building plans, the population rejoiced. The other council races tended to look upon this with a benign, condescending sort of amusement.  
  
In London, an ancient tradition was reborn as the Thames froze over for the first time in hundreds of years. Some clever wag at Alliance Command with a mind for folk history remembered London’s ice fairs, held over winter on the surface of the river. This was the pleasure section of the Thames - since 2150 only the artificial islands beyond the mouth of the river had been used for proper cargo haulage - so nobody begrudged the use of river space, and the ice went unbroken.  
  
The Fairs were a sorely needed bit of fun for a population not yet a decade away from the war. The reconstruction building philosophy stressed an environmentally friendly, courtyard style of living - mid-rise, elegant apartment complexes, built to be self-heating and energy efficient. The designs were praised - different kinds of homes were built into each complex, with internal gardens and allotments designed to allow people to grow food themselves or have their plot managed as a green space. The aim was to rebuild Earth’s structures in a sustainable manner, and the Alliance had seized control of the planet's shattered governments to make the mammoth building programme possible and to distribute food and resources. They had been efficient, but draconian, and while Earth now had a broadly unified government for the first time in its history, issues of democratic representation rang hoarse through the new planetside Alliance parliament.  
  
Everyone was exhausted, and the Ice Fairs allowed a moment of merriment. Every Saturday the various booths would drive thin metal poles into the thick ice, anchoring themselves, and the central rinks would be cleared. Around eleven o’clock in the morning the families would arrive, pouring out of the glass facade of Westminster underground station, dragging legions of badly behaved children behind them. The day would be filled with their screams of laughter - Alliance Command overlooked this stretch of the river, built as a modern cyborg from the broken face of the old Houses of Parliament. It was a work of restoration - the glass front rose up from the fragment of the old structure that still stood, and Alliance personnel spent their breaks gazing outward over the gathered fairground crowds.  
  
In the afternoon, the mood got a little quieter as the day got colder. Teenagers tended to show up around three, clustering as teenagers are wont to do. All the potential flowerings of young love could be found among the multi-species crowd - the sons and daughters of the turian military attache posted to London were notorious for bagging human Londoners, and the ice rinks were crowded at the edges with teen couples right up until the early evening, when the sun went down and the lights went on.  
  
At night, the Ice Fairs became positively magical - the light reflected off the ice, off the glass front of Alliance Command, and the river was filled with a gentle, twinkling glow from a million sources. Adults arrived with their friends, their lovers, the spiced wine stalls opened in earnest, and the crowd swelled to its largest and most sedate. Over time it became easy to tell the tourists from the Londoners - there were few who lived in London who had not learned to skate. A very popular Extranet video of the time showed nothing but a montage of various Council species falling on their arses within the London ice rinks - it was entitled ‘Earth Hospitality’.  
  
The London Ice Fair at night became an emblem of a rebuilding Earth - along with its brother ice fairs across Northern Europe and Canada, the reopened coffee houses in Asmara, Aden, Djibouti and Cairo, the tea shops in Shanghai, Chengdu, Tokyo and Seoul. They were small elements of what was before, sometimes lost for hundreds of years before being pieced together by the new planet’s inhabitants. People were having fun, finally, after years of being concerned only with survival.  
  
It was a month or so into the fairground season when Jacob and Dylan finally found time to go. Jacob fobbed off a strategic review of Central London crime to the next Tuesday, Dylan took a long weekend. They met outside Alliance HQ, just as the sun set - the snow and ice rendered everything softly orange-tinted. Jacob leant against smooth metal railings, occasionally shaking back and forth to dismiss the cold.  
  
The sunlight produced a faint glimmer around him. By the time Dylan arrived, the angle of the sun dazzled onlookers. He stopped for a second, because Jacob was beautiful.   
  
“You’re smoking again.” Jacob said it in a disapproving sort of way, then gave something of a half-smirk, half-grin, allowing himself to be encompassed by Dylan’s hug. They stayed there together for a while.  
  
“Sorry. S’just for relaxing. During summits.” Jacob could feel the vibration from his voice. They were that close.  
  
“Nah. It’s only ever your coat that smells. I’d kill you if you did it in the house.”  
  
“You wouldn’t. You’d nag me and I’d probably listen.” Dylan kissed him, because he was there and it was for him to do.  
  
Jacob pulled back, smirking. “You’d better listen.” They stood for a long time, murmuring to one another, sheltering one another from the cold. It was only when the dark crept in a little more that they decided to move on. Dylan slipped an arm around Jacob’s waist, and they walked like that for a while, their umbilical slowness a testament to their investment in one another. They could just walk, without a purpose.  
  
Dylan’d never had that with anyone. The ability to be together, without a purpose beyond itself. It had made life after the war ring with a peculiar, welcome certainty.  
  
Jacob had known it, but it had never lasted as long as this. Sometimes he thought about how by now, they had been together for longer than they’d been apart. He lost himself in the memory of those frantic visits taken during Dylan’s house arrest, when they’d thought there would never be a chance to say anything, so they said everything. Even then, it had only been with the threat of Reapers hanging over them that they’d really started to be together. Jacob could remember standing outside the prefab shelter that passed for HQ in those early reconstruction days, when they assumed Dylan dead, and thinking - well damn, the love of my life and we only did it once.  
  
He gave a tiny grin and leant into Dylan as they walked. There were a lot of things they did for one another that were quiet, unspoken. Jacob knew, for example, that Dylan slipped his arm around Jacob’s waist at least a little because he was self conscious of “that damn limp” - it was always referred to in third person, like something separate. And Jacob knew that Dylan pampered him, paid attention, was sometimes elaborately attentive. Sometimes Dylan would just state things, state “I love you”, and his face would be very serious and very grave. Jacob was always surprised by it, but later, when he was in a quieter mood and the ones he’d lost were on his mind, those I love yous would buoy him slightly. Sometimes they’d have long talks about these things and sometimes they wouldn’t, but there was a trust - it hung between them, fragile but stronger by the day.

  
They approached the Ice Fair - now the lights had come on, the coloured strings that wove together the various stalls, leaving scattered remnants of themselves in the solid ice. Pulsing through everything was the warm orange glow of hundreds of sparklers, arcade lights, hanging lanterns within game-stands, streetlights from a hundred metres away, and the subtle yellow buzz that returned from the ice. To Jacob it seemed as if the entire world were saturated in tiny colours.  
  
From each side came conflicting, busied smells - the burnt wood of constantly popping turian air-crackers, the savoury fog of kebab stalls, burger stalls, fish and chip stalls, the frozen breathtaking air, the damp vapour from the water pistol games, the occasional snatch of perfume - and next to it all, buried in the thick coat of his husband, Jacob smelled that cigarette smoke, mint-flavoured.   
  
“Let’s skate,” Dylan said, and so they did.  
  
There were so many rinks, so much natural ice, that none were ever full. By the rinkside a tight circle of human teenagers attempted to cajole their less enthusiastic turian companion - he kept saying something about ending up on the extranet. One woman was helping her boyfriend shuffle out of the ring with a slight scowl on her face as he lamented “my bloody leg” in a pained sort of way. Far on the other side a father was trying to shepherd two small children onto the rink at the same time. Beside him an Asari was losing herself deep within a human woman’s mouth. The hubbub preceded like this before them, but Jacob was gentle and careful.  
  
They changed into their skates; Jacob helped Dylan up, then they made their way to the rink surface. It wasn’t as easy as it might’ve been; Dylan could skate by himself on a good day - but it wasn’t a good day. Jacob could tell that from a look nowadays.  
  
Dylan’s arm slipped around his waist again, and they moved slowly onto the ice.  
  
“I feel like an invalid. Like you’re my handler.” He said it through gritted teeth. The age difference between them didn’t help. It had never been an issue before Commander Shepard became the injured one of them. The less able to move and exercise and do things. And sometimes it was frustrating as hell - even for Jacob. But Jesus, it didn’t change things.  
  
Or at least, it wasn’t a dealbreaker.  
  
“You’re my husband.” Jacob said it with force, looking directly into Dylan’s eyes. Dylan’s frustration and rage seemed to crumple. He looked almost apologetic.  
  
They skated to the centre of the rink - others avoided the centre, it was where the couples rotated. Jacob was determined to remind him they were here to relax, to enjoy themselves. He gave Dylan a long, slow kiss - he got a reluctant sort of grin in return.  
  
“I am your husband,” he murmured, and took Jacob’s hand. They had always danced - Dylan was terrible at it, but Jacob tended to compensate, now more than ever. On the ice that night they danced, and held each other, circling slowly. The rhythm lent strength to Dylan’s posture, and soon they were smiling pointlessly at each other, flirting without speech. They had weathered much, and valued these moments of peace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
